For the report, Outsell surveyed about 7,000 information workers via Web polls, focus groups, and telephone interviews over the last two years. Roger Strouse, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell, Inc., said the numbers were unambiguous: while Google was the preferred search engine for 64 percent of information workers in January 2005, that number jumped to 74 percent by February of this year.

Breaking the results down by industry, the numbers showed only slight variation across professional lines. In the corporate world, the number of users surveyed who preferred Google climbed from 65 to 75 percent, in government 61 to 76 percent, and in academia 68 to 78 percent. Health care trailed the pack with a more modest increase from 62 to 68 percent. Google's gains cut directly into Yahoo and MSN users, the Outsell report stated, with Yahoo shrinking from 18 to 15 percent total share and MSN from 9 to 7 percent. One bright spot for MSN was users in the health care industry, where it held onto its 10 percent share.

But Google isn't home free, Strouse warned, pointing to rising dissatisfaction with Internet search as a tool for information workers--regardless of the provider. The chief complaint is inefficiency, reflected in Outsell data showing big increases in the average time workers spend on "information tasks," with total time across the three industries rising from an average 10.9 hours a week to 12; health care showed the biggest increase, jumping 8.1 to 10 hours weekly. According to Outsell, in many instances the culprit is search failure due to irrelevant results--which it says rose from 28 percent of total searches to 30 percent over the last two years.

Strouse said a variety of factors are to blame for search failure, including deliberate manipulation of Google's semantic system: "From early on there's been a problem with what people used to call spamdexing, where people would apply tags to their Web sites that actually had no relation to the content at all. And that problem is still there, and is definitely going to have to be resolved some time soon."

As a result, many information workers are turning to proprietary "intranets" for some kinds of information, believing they represent a more filtered and sorted pool of information--but intranet search, "inside the firewall," raises a host of new problems--including the widely differing formats of digital documents, according to Strouse. Indeed, intranet and Internet search have roughly equal failure rates, he noted.

Meanwhile, Google's moves to create sub-sites focused on particular kinds of content are important steps in rendering search more efficient, Strouse said--approving, for example, of the recent introduction of Google Scholar. And the market is still dynamic, especially if any of the engines can deliver more efficient search: "Certainly we haven't seen the end of the search engine wars."

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